As a compromise, David agrees to start building our cottage on the land up north, and we head to Maine the following May to watch the builder break ground. I had expected to feel relieved at leaving the city, but instead the grief wells up with each mile and crashes over me at the state line. We pass the salt marshes of the southern coast, the sandy beaches, the rolling green of fields and fir. With Milo asleep in the back seat and David behind the wheel, I sob so hard we have to pull over to the breakdown lane so I can vomit.
* * *
On the beach, I watch a tiny green crab scrabble across the pebbles and shells. How can something so small do such damage? I wonder. In the past few years, they’ve invaded the shore and eaten up everything the mussels used to feed on, or at least that’s one theory; whether it’s fact or fiction I can’t say. I do know that where once the shellfish were abundant, easily picked, now there are almost none, and I imagine them starved to death by these tiny interlopers, this cancer on the natural order. The crabs don’t know they survive at the expense of others, and why should they care? This is how life is: my feast is your famine; your freedom, my prison.
The tide ebbs, but the memories flow, some vague and fleeting, others immediate and clear. I recall being back in France. It’s 2010 and Philip and I have come to Antibes to watch our mother die surrounded by jasmine, lavender, and olive trees in the crumbly limestone farmhouse where she and her second husband retired. George is already six years gone. The same lung cancer that took him has come for her. I imagine them passing death back and forth with every kiss, like a virus in a wisp of smoke. Starved for air, she labors to breathe, her gasps getting wetter and shallower every day. She has told us no feeding tubes, just drugs; she was very clear about it. Compared to this, my father’s death doesn’t seem so horrible. In the days before she dies, when she breaks the surface of the morphine sea, she keeps telling me to find someone to love me. “But I have, I’m married to David. Remember, Maman?” I say. She rolls her eyes. Eventually I stop answering.
During the days I spend with Philip in the house above the Mediterranean, I have time to think and I come to understand that 9/11 was not the beginning of the end for David and me. Yes, we were damaged, but every day people endure tragedy, and they manage to stay together. My brother’s third child died just two weeks before she was to be born, and his poor wife had to go through labor and delivery, knowing she would give birth to a corpse. They went on to have two more children, found a way to keep loving each other and believe in their future. The truth is, David and I got married to be married. We are a house built on sand and buttressed by our son. I hope it will be enough, but my hope has no wings; a flightless bird, it is tethered, earthbound.
When Milo goes off to college, David and I lose our buffer, the cartilage between the two bones, he and I. Living together is lonely, for both of us, I think. We work longer hours, fight more often, then stop bothering to fight at all. For a few more years we hold on, and when the end comes, I’m more relieved than sad, and probably he is, too.
* * *
I shift my chair out of the lengthening shadows and into the last patch of sun to try to stay warm, extend my time on the shore with the brine in the air and the lap of the waves. There’s movement in my peripheral vision, and I watch as a big sloop rounds the headland, beating to windward. It’s unusual to see anything but kayaks and the occasional motorboat in the reach. There’s no navigable outlet other than the approach, which shrinks to a tight, shallow trench at low tide. Why would they come here, especially with the tide going? Maybe they’re looking for safe harbor.
My husband never felt safe here. A city boy, born and raised in Manhattan, David always said it was too quiet, that there was no one to hear you scream if something dangerous—a bear, a pack of rabid raccoons, toothless guys with chain saws—came out of the woods. When I left him, he told me to take the cottage, said he’d never come back to this place, that it had never been his.
For me the divorce was an act of self-preservation, a lifeline, selfish but necessary in the way such things are. Though he was twenty-two at the time, Milo was devastated when we split up, said it was my fault because I was the one who left, and didn’t speak to me for three months. That was the worst part. Every silent day in my miserable sublet I waited for his call and thought about dying, longed for it the way you do an old lover or lost faith, but I lacked the courage to see it through and instead slopped along until the morning David showed up with our boy, and Milo shouted, cursed, and sobbed his way back into my life.
It’s still not right between us, not like it was before, and maybe it never will be, but this was the kindest thing David ever did for me. He didn’t have to. He could have kept on holding the moral high ground, but he was better than that, better than us, and I am grateful.
After the rapprochement with Milo, I tried living in France. My work is portable, requiring nothing but an iPad, Wi-Fi, and a middling amount of creativity, so I decided to go to Paris for a while, try to start over. Philip lives there with his family, I speak the language, and I have always been a city person. After six months, I was still unsettled; it wasn’t home, and I knew it never would be.
* * *
From my saggy chaise I watch the tide recede, carrying the martyred ladybugs past the anchoring sloop and out to sea. I wonder how far they’ll go, imagine them floating east, nearly weightless on the surface of the Atlantic, drifting around the tip of the U.K., into the Channel, and upstream on the Seine to Paris, a gift from my dead father and me to my brother.
Philip always hated Maine, the cold and the snow, the isolation and the people. “Inbred and frozen in backwardness,” he calls them, and has instead embraced his French half, the part that came from our mother. He and his wife teach at the Sorbonne; their kids bring the grandchildren over for dinner every Sunday. When we talk on the phone Philip keeps to French, answering my lazy franglais with professorial grammar, complicated syntax, and obscure vocabulary. Just to tweak him, I call him Pip, like Maman did. He says he hates it, but I know he doesn’t, not really.
The beach lengthens as the tide ebbs, dragging the shadows along with it; I can almost see them stretch. Soon the sun will drop behind my cottage, stealing the last bit of heat and the final dregs of daylight. I recall one low-tide evening, the summer we built this place, when the setting sun shone gold and bounced off the water, gilding the seaweed-covered rocks across the reach in a paroxysm of light that transformed our world into a Turner painting, glowing luminous color in liquid swirl. It lasted only a minute or two as David and I watched, together, silent, holding hands. I’ve always wanted to be able to paint that scene, to re-create that moment, that light, on canvas, but I work better in shades of dark.
Today the sunset disappoints, just slips below the horizon and dims the sky to deeper blue, and so I fold up my chair and wedge it behind a rock, safely above the high-water mark. I think about pulling my boat out of the garage and rowing over to the sloop, now sitting at anchor in the middle of the reach, where the water is deepest. I imagine the boat owners, a happy family gathered belowdecks, having dinner and playing cards, and I wonder what they’d make of me, if they’d smell my desperation and avoid me or offer me a drink and invite me aboard. Probably neither, it would just be uncomfortable, a forced interchange, and we’d all be glad when it was over.
I pass by the toolshed David and I converted to an art studio and remember the paintings in the living room. Some are complete, but most are unfinished. In the cellar, I find a crowbar and carry it upstairs, where the crates lean against the wall. The temperature is dropping, but soon I am sweating with the effort of prying them open. Once I’ve uncrated the canvases, I line them up around the room, a rogue’s gallery of old friends and a few enemies. I try to remember the last time I picked up a brush.
One painting in particular takes me back to my studio in Brooklyn. I couldn’t get it right and it was giving me fits right up until I packed it away. It’s a winter landscape, based on an ol
d photo of the Baines farmhouse that was taken in the forties, when my father was growing up there. In the picture, the house, where my cousin Cora lives now, is surrounded by snow, its black roof straight as a ship’s prow in a sea of winter white, broken only by the pole of a clothesline that pokes skyward like the periscope of a submarine. I was trying to capture the bleakness of the half-light and the heavy clouds but succeeded only in creating a scene that’s more suitable for one of my clients’ “I’m sorry” cards than a gallery wall. Technically it’s not bad, but it lacks soul. I still don’t know how to fix it, so I turn it around to stop it mocking me. In the kitchen, dinner awaits: pudding and wine. It’ll do.
* * *
The next morning my head aches and my mouth tastes like the inside of a bait barrel. It’s after nine, and in my mind I hear Grandma Baines, always appalled by louche behavior, admonishing me for being a filthy stay-abed.
I pick up a half-empty wine bottle, carry it downstairs, and shove it in the fridge, rather than dumping it down the sink and tossing it in the bin beside the one I emptied before it. Waste not, and all that. In the pantry there’s a can of chicken noodle soup that won’t expire for another week, so I nuke it and carry it to the sofa, trying to figure out whether it’s worth a visit to the grocery store to avoid subsisting on peanut butter and stale crackers.
Today the weather is dank, the fog thick as paste. The sloop is either invisible in the mist or already gone, leaving me alone with the ladybugs, the crabs, and the dead. I wonder if it was ever really there at all and figure that since a walk around town and a little human contact are the last things I want, they’re probably just what I need.
I shower to warm up and am surprised at the lurch in my stomach when I see David’s robe hanging on the back of the bathroom door. The cottage, though all mine now, is still full of his things, which makes me even lonelier than the weak gray light does, so I call him to ask what to do with it all—his clothes, photos, and books, the birthday gifts Milo and I gave him at the parties we threw for him every August.
My ex-husband sounds surprised to hear from me. “Would you like me to pack everything up and send it to you?” I ask, and realize I don’t have his address. We were together for almost thirty years and now I don’t even know where he sleeps.
“Just donate it or junk it. There’s nothing I need,” he says, delivering a gut punch I never saw coming.
“Not even the photos, or the books?” I can’t bring myself to mention the presents: Milo’s little handicrafts, the stainless-steel wineglasses I got for picnics in the rowboat, the “Fish Gut Lane” T-shirt we had made the year the cottage was finished.
“If I haven’t missed them by now, I never will. Anything you think is worth saving, you can give to Milo. Gotta run. Good to hear from you, Suzanne. Take care, now.”
With a click he disappears back into his new life, the one that doesn’t include even a thought of me. David never was attached to things, places, never kept anything or dragged it around for long. I can’t remember him holding a grudge for more than a few minutes; even his grief was short-lived, efficient, complete in reasonable time. When his mother died, he was devastated, but it was clean, uncomplicated pain: he loved her, she loved him, she was gone. We sat shiva, buried her, and moved on. How I envy his unencumbrance.
I think there might be things Milo would want but am overcome by the desire to get rid of it all, to unencumber myself, so I grab some garbage bags from the kitchen and start emptying drawers into them, not stopping to sort or fold, thinking I’ll drop everything at Goodwill on my way to the Foodland.
I draw the line at David’s underwear, carry the small drawer to the kitchen, and turn it out into the trash. The socks and boxers fall, but the last thing that drops is a picture. Taken a lifetime ago, the photo shows Milo perched on David’s shoulders. His blond curls tumble down his three-year-old neck; he’s laughing so hard his eyes are shut, and his mouth is wide-open. David, waist deep in Long Lake on a fine summer day, holds Milo’s ankles in one hand while the other reaches up to save his boy from falling backward into the water. David is laughing, too, his shoulders more broad than bowed, not a trace of gray in his hair. I remember taking that picture. I remember David being young and cheerful and Milo wanting nothing more than to spend the day being thrown into the lake and passed from David to me and back again.
In those days David thought I was interesting, said he’d never met a girl who could gut a fish and navigate a gallery party. I thought I’d found my soul mate in a corporate lawyer who read poetry for pleasure and could recite every line of Duck Soup from memory. During visits to the Baines family farm, before we built our place, he’d weed the garden and shovel horse manure with the kind of enthusiasm only a city boy could muster. The day I taught him to drive the tractor, he said it was the best of his life.
And yet here we are, no we left. Like the sloop in the reach, David has moved on, turned around and sailed away to a safer harbor, remarried and content, but I am landlocked, my wheels still spinning, sinking in the mud of the past sucking me down, deeper and deeper, in the swamp of memory. Trapped in a marriage long dead but still unburied, the bits and pieces of it scattered and rotting all around me, unable to find my way out, I am haunted: by killer waves on gray water, burning papers like swirling birds, the unburied dead, the unfinished past, the unyielding everything.
* * *
I open the door to my studio, set down my jar of turpentine, and place the winterscape on the easel. I know what’s wrong with it now. Instead of standing straight and square under the white snow sky, the Baines homestead should be half-buried, collapsing in on itself with the weight of all that surrounds it and all that has gone before. With a whispered prayer for inspiration, I squeeze black paint onto my palette, next to it some white and a touch of blue. I dab my brush and begin the delicate task of bashing in the roof.
Requiem aeternam dona īnsepultīs eis, Domine.
(Grant the unburied eternal rest, O Lord.)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Much of the production of this book happened during the most harrowing months of 2020, amidst the suffering and death of a worldwide pandemic as well as ongoing racial injustice and political unrest in the United States. I cannot fathom how, in New York, the people of Flatiron Books got out of bed in the morning, let alone stayed focused and kept working. And yet they did, professionally, compassionately, and well, on my book and many others. It was a marvel to see and a joy to be part of.
For taking a flyer on a quiet book about small lives and helping it become a real novel through hard, dark times, thank you, Megan Lynch. Special thanks as well to Callum Plews, Katherine Turro, Claire McLaughlin, Lauren Bittrich, and everybody at Flatiron and Macmillan.
Deepest thanks to Stephanie Cabot of Susanna Lea Associates for plucking me from the slush and believing in this book. Thanks, too, to Ellen Goodson Coughtrey and Sophie Pugh-Sellers. Thank you, Roma Panganiban, my first reader.
I also want to thank the entire publishing industry—authors, agents, editors, publishers, printers, shippers, truck drivers, and booksellers—for soldiering on to keep the world of words and ideas alive when we needed books so much.
I owe so much to the great storytellers I have been lucky enough to know. Over more years than I care to count, they have shared their stories, jokes, and observations and in the process taught me the power of words to uplift, amuse, challenge, and irk. From them I have borrowed many stories and excellent turns of phrase. For those still living, I hope you don’t mind. Thank you: Roy E. (for Easy) Pierce, Pauline Tetzlaff Hinman, Sue DeMarco DiSalvio, Janet H. Fitzpatrick, Baxter Jones, Lillian Arlene Burpee, and the unforgettable Mrs. Dorothy Quinn.
A thousand thanks (and that’s not near enough) to Robin Grunder at Blue Egg Strategy for taking my chaotic scribblings without complaint and rendering the messy world of my characters and their relationships clearly and elegantly in all those family trees. You reign supreme.
I am indebted to my
trusted group of readers for their patience in looking at things (over and over again), for their insight, and for their support through thick and thin: Rosalyn Hoffman Feldberg, Karen Plummer Winslow, Cristy Carrington Lewis, Stephanie Lewin, and Nick Ferrone.
Thank you, Kathi Hansen, genius writer, most astute reader, fierce champion, spit sister. Where would I be without you? My gratitude is endless and my debt unpayable, but I will keep trying.
Thank you, Betsy Parsons, for introducing me to literature all those years ago. (I know you’re still reading, because heaven is surely a library.) Thanks to Shelly Oria for telling me I could write, and Sarah Blake for reading. At NYU, thank you, Helen Schulman, Darin Strauss, and Deborah Landau. I will be ever grateful to the brilliant John Freeman for his kindness, for believing in this project, and for knowing what I was trying to do even when I didn’t.
Thanks to my mother, Barbara Kimball, for believing I could do anything and insisting it was true. I am eternally grateful to my grandmothers, Florence Burpee and Susan Bean, and my grandfathers, Albert Kimball and Harvey Winslow, who are everywhere in this book and my life. Thank you, Dad—and all the Winslows, Kimballs, and Pierces in this world and the next—for putting up with me, for being funny and difficult and clever and tough, but mostly for being there.
I owe more than I can say to my lifelong friends who long ago became family. Thanks for sticking with me, Mary Quinn and Frank Hodgkins, supreme raconteurs and two of the finest, funniest, smartest people I have ever known. Without you this book would not exist.
Always and ever, Max Dietshe and Grace Winslow Dietshe, thank you for being the most patient kin, my miracle and my life. You are just everything, and then some more.
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